A memoir of Gerard Kennedy Tucker, Angiican priest, founder of the Brotherhood of
BROTHERHOOD s t Laurence and Community Aid Abroadof S! LAURENCE
Heiping peoptebuitd better iives David Scott
He got things done
a memoir ofGerard Kennedy Tucker, Angiican priest,
founder ofThe Brotherhood of St Laurence andCommunity Aid Abroad
David Scott
'Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord shalt enter the kingdom of heaven but he that doeth the wilt of my Father'
Matthew 7:21.
First published in November 2000 by theBrotherhood of St Laurence67 Brunswick StreetFitzroy VIC 3065Telephone (03) 9483 1183www.bsl.org.au
Scott, David He got things done:a memoir of Gerard Kennedy Tucker, Anglican Priest, founder of The Brotherhood of St Laurence and Community Aid Abroad
ISBN 1-876250-40-2
@ Brotherhood of St Laurence, 2000This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
C o f e /? f s
Introduction 1
Early life 7
After the war 15
A personal reflection 21
Notes 33
/ / 7 f f 0 ( y ; v C f / 0 / 7
In the early light at 6.30 am on 7 November 1944, two Anglican priests, Gerard Kennedy Tucker and Frank Coaldrake, and welfare officer Tony Bishop occupied the verandah of a house in St James Road in the Melbourne suburb of Armadale. They would remain, they said, until the sub-tenant vacated to allow the ill, 85-year-old owner to spend her last days in her own home. The legal position of sub-tenants was unclear under Commonwealth wartime tenancy regulations. The sub-tenant, a young man, had resisted repeated requests to allow the owner possession of her home.
The angry tenant tried bullying, and a bewildered constable persuasion, but the squatters remained. After the first edition of the afternoon //&/<?%/ crowds of people drifted along the street to stare over the fence and ask questions. At midnight a reporter making her final call saw the besiegers huddled on the windswept verandah, Tucker on a bridge chair wrapped in a rug.
In the morning the party shaved by turns at a small hand mirror and breakfasted from food and thermos tea brought by sympathisers. A police patrol drove slowly past as Tucker said Morning Prayer at 7 am. Tucker's secretary, Shirley Abraham,
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made a makeshift tabie of a briefcase across her knees to take dictation. Teiegrams were sent to the Prime Minister John Curtin, Opposition Leader Robert Menzies, the State Premier Albert Dunstan and Opposition Leader John Cain. Commonweaith Security Officers and men from the Price Branch questioned the verandah sitters.
The baker and milkman arrived with orders, mail was deiivered but an application for a tetephone was refused, it was rumoured that some members of the RSL were pianning to hose the sitters off the verandah, unaware that Tucker, as a Chaplain in the front tines in France, had officiated at the buriai services of more than 800 Austrian soldiers.
Frail, 60-year-old Tucker was an early casualty but Coaldrake and Bishop maintained the siege for 37 days. It ended when Tucker decided he would enter the house and be arrested to break the impasse. He would refuse to pay any fine and if necessary go to prison. He wrote to the tenant describing the action he would take unless the key was given up within 24 hours. The key arrived and soon after Mrs Thompson was sitting with the Brotherhood 'task force' enjoying a cup of tea in her kitchen.
At the centre of the dispute was the Landlord and Tenant Act and wartime emergency regulations, described by Chief Justice Sir Frederick Mann as a legal 'hotch potch'. Before resorting to the 'verandah vigil' Tucker and Coaldrake explored every legal and political avenue, including meetings with the sympathetic local MP, Harold Holt, to find a way for Mrs Thompson to reclaim her home.
Two months earlier Coaldrake and Bishop had barricaded themselves inside a house in King William Street Fitzroy to prevent the eviction of the de Campo parents and their seven children. Coaldrake, in clerical attire, explained to reporters that the Brotherhood was resisting in order to draw attention to the injustice
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of eviction. Hundreds of other famiiies faced simiiar situations uniess the law was changed.
There was brief and spirited action when five uniformed poiice and four detectives stormed the King Wiiiiam Street property. The poiice burst in the window barricades and kicked in the nailed up front door. Bishop and Coaidrake, trying to stop them, were pushed out of the way but struggled from room to room to prevent de Campo's belongings from being taken out.
Coaidrake, 'with a cut over his eye and torn clothes, was dragged out of the kitchen but clung to the stairway banister, until a member of the raiding party, resorting to a childhood trick, tickled him under the arms and he let go'. The de Campos, who had been paying the sub-tenant three times the rent the owner received, were evicted but the laws were later changed.
The 'de Campo' case and the 'verandah vigil' made newspaper headlines around Australia and earned the Brotherhood praise and condemnation. The Melbourne wasscathing. 'Whatever might be the defects of the Landlord and Tenant Regulations there are more seemly and effective ways of drawing attention to them than by antics reminiscent of the old- time suffragettes. It is not for trespassers, however well meaning, to constitute themselves arbiters of who shall live where.'
Tucker explained his motives in letters, leaflets and his weekly
radio programs.
We could have turned away the widow in her affliction, uttered unctuous words of sorrow that the law was against her... but we chose, for better or worse to stay by her.We have broken the law to appeal to public
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opinion . . . in so far as the pubiicity has been turned on ourseives we have become notorious 'stunters' and we are ashamed of it. But in so far as the publicity passes through us on to the iniquity we wouid ciear away, we wilt succeed in our appeal to the public.
7?7<5^gave him a column in which to explain his actions. Heading it 'Why I Am Breaking The Law', he wrote:
I did not just hop out of bed one morning a week ago and come here for some excitement and notoriety. I and my colleagues came only after a most painstaking investigation and careful consideration following ten years of work trying to improve housing conditions but alt the time frustrated by out of date housing taws.
The press has naturally enough sifted out the 'news', focussed the limelight on the picturesque and spared readers the boredom of legal argument, theological justification and political wrangling.
The defence of the de Campos and Mrs Thompson were highly political acts at variance with the non-political role of the Churches. They raised questions of social justice when the main concerns of the Churches were Sunday observance, gambling and alcohol. Tucker was tolerant of these personal 'sins' but angry about the collective immorality that tolerated slums, unemployment, exploitation and inadequate education, health and welfare services.
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Sixty years later at the end of a century of unprecedented weaith generation, more than a million A u str ia n s and their dependents are suffering the effects of unemployment, a quarter of a million families are on public housing iists, an increasing number of peopte are abusing drugs and there is an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Does Tucker's outrage, his totat identification with causes, his wiilingness to break the law and be criticised, offer any iessons for beleaguered social activists at the beginning of the twenty first century?
How did he found two of Austraiia's most influentiai organisations, the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Community Aid Abroad that still work to his principles of 'demonstrating on a smalt scale what needs to be done on a large scale', 'putting a fence at the top of the cliff instead of an ambulance at the bottom' and 'arousing the conscience of the community'?
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F a r / / / /' / e
Gerard Tucker was born in 1885 in the vicarage of Christ Church South Yarra, a prosperous Melbourne suburb where his father Canon Horace Tucker was vicar for 28 years. Gerard enjoyed a happy childhood with three sisters and two brothers in a rambling vicarage set between spacious Fawkner Park and the grand, bluestone Church where Anglican members of Melbourne's political, professional and commercial establishment worshipped.^
His grandfather, his father, the First World War and a deeply held Christian faith shaped his life. His clergyman grandfather, Joseph Kidger Tucker, came to Australia at the age of 43 as the first Australasian agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society. For the next eight years Joseph 'became an absentee husband and father to his wife and eight children as he crisscrossed the continent galvanising the faithful into action through his fund raising and bible selling campaigns'.
In his first 18 months Joseph Kidger Tucker covered more than 20,000 kilometres by boat, coach, jinker and horseback as he organised more than 100 meetings of auxiliaries and branches in north and east Victoria. He distributed more Bibles during eight
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years than in the previous 40 and was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury.After several years as Archdeacon of Beechworth, a parish of 400,000 hectares and responsibiiities as archdeacon for ait of northeastern Victoria, he retired to live with his son and his famiiy in the Christ Church vicarage. His grandson Gerard Kennedy Tucker was 2-years-old.
Gerard's father, Horace Finn Tucker, a taii man with a big beard and striking appearance, founded three mission chapels and a school and raised money for a handsome spire for Christ Church. In the depression years of the 1890s he promoted schemes for resettling unemployed families in the country. His Christian socialist novel 7/76* A&M'/l/CHaK? was a surprising work to emerge from one of Melbourne's most conservative Anglican parishes. He also wrote (a book of poems)Z/y/7Z? AyZayyyrZ?,?^ (a reflection on the saints of the Church) and articles on social questions.
Young Gerard's early life gave tittle indication that he would emulate his father, although he greatly admired his father and the other 'greats' of the Anglican Church who visited the vicarage. On leaving Melbourne Church of England Grammar he worked in a sugar factory and on a relative's farm. He had a speech impediment, which was thought to preclude him from the ministry, but in 1908 at the age of 23 he entered St John's Theological College, Melbourne.
He failed the final examination in 1910 due to extreme nervousness and offered his services to the Bishop of the newly founded Diocese of the North West. Explaining the decision he wrote: 'Something of the spirit of my forebears [W.A. Brodribb, explorer and pastoralist] and my grandfather Joseph Kidger Tucker may have prompted me to embark on that pioneer work'.
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'The life, though, was not one for a newly made Deacon', he ad d ed .H e may also have wished to leave Melbourne, the scene of his failure.
He was appointed Curate of the parish of Roebourne and stationed at Onslow, 'primitive indeed', and some 500 miles from his Rector at Roebourne. On a 500 mile journey in a two-horse buggy to visit three cattle stations he almost lost his life in a flash flood. When he returned to Onslow, 'My verandah home had been swept away in the cyclone and alt my belongings were scattered over the surrounding area'. After Gerard contracted fever his father made the tong journey to Roebourne and soon after Tucker returned to Melbourne. He became curate at St George's Malvern, a middle class suburb of Melbourne. He was finally ordained priest in 1914.
When the First World War broke out he attempted to enlist but was rejected for being too young. He joined the Ambulance Corps as a private and three months later was appointed Chaplain. He spent many months in the front lines in France working in casualty clearing stations and officiating at the burial of some 800 men. He described the 'madness, horror and sin' of war in letters to 'Mother Dear', published as 7776*A//^(1919).
He made an offer of marriage to a young woman connected with the Church family he stayed with in England when he was on leave. Handheld says the offer was declined. 'Then she changed her mind and asked him to take her back, but Gerard's temperament did not allow for second thoughts and he did not renew his o ffe r.H andhe ld speculates that Tucker did not take the lady back when she showed, by her hesitation, that she might have doubts about him. 'Gerard had been fighting doubters since childhood and the only way he had been able to keep his
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self-confidence was by brushing them aside and foliowing his own counsel.'
in 1920 he became vicar of the working ciass parish of St Stephen's Adamstown in the Diocese of Newcastle where his sister's husband, Reginald Stephen, was Bishop. On 8 December 1930 at the age of 45 he realised his lifeiong dream of forming a brotherhood of men committed to serving the Church in industrial areas, iiving frugaily as a community and providing opportunities for education and training for others wishing to enter the ministry.
Members were to remain 'unmarried, abstain from engagement to marry and at aii times behave in such a way as if the unmarried state had been taken for iife'. There was no commitment to membership for iife or for a particuiar period of time. The 'chapter' or governing body was made up of ordained men, the 'greater chapter' inctuded the iaymen. The founding members were Tucker, young priest Guy Cox and Michael Ctarke, a young man training for the ministry.
in 1933, still with only three members, the Brotherhood moved to the Mission church of St Mary the Virgin in Fitzroy, part of the Anglo-Catholic parish of St Peter's Eastern Hill in Melbourne. The move was at the invitation of Archbishop Head and at the initiative of the Vicar, Canon Farnham Maynard.
Maynard was a formidable intellectual and a Christian Socialist, and he admired and gave full support to Tucker's social concerns expressed through welfare services and political campaigning for reform. However, Maynard may have viewed the Brotherhood's work as 'cosmetic, treating the symptoms of social maladjustment' and not the causes, which Maynard saw as the capitalist system.^
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The founders of the Brotherhood of St Laurence. From left: Michael Clarke, Gerard Tucker and Guy Cox at St Cuthbert's, East Brunswick, 1936.
At first Tucker saw the rote of the Brotherhood as evangelicat, to bring in 'the tost sheep of the house of Israet' and to make St Mary's a 'church of the people of our part of Fitzroy'. it was a difficuit task. After one year he reported the number of communicants had risen from 10 to 20. Tucker wrote, 'We cannot forget the vast numbers of peopte living atmost within the shadow of the church who are starving for the Food which the Church atone can give them'. But the Brotherhood was attracting young men. its membership had grown from two members to 17.
The form of worship at St Mary's, seen by Canon Maynard as 'the centre at which Marian feasts were celebrated', aggravated Tucker's 'impatience of those who loved rituat for its own sake '/ Tucker believed in 'the beauty of holiness' but preferred the more moderate 'Engtish use' of the pre-Reformation church in England to the 'western use' derived largely from Roman Catholic worship in vogue in western Europe and used at St Mary's. He was also unhappy that so few of the congregation were local people. Most,
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attracted by St Mary's form of worship, came from other parts of Melbourne.
Tucker and his colleagues were appalled by the hardship and suffering caused by the unemployment and slum housing that surrounded them, and decided the Brotherhood must respond. Their emphasis changed from parish pastoral work to welfare and social action. Tucker used a 10 shilling donation to rent a single fronted house in Fitzroy Street to provide accommodation for half-a-dozen, homeless, unemployed men.
In the next few years other hostels were opened providing accommodation for more than 100 men. This was followed by an ambitious scheme to resettle unemployed families in the country, modelled on his father's unsuccessful settlement movement of the 1890s. George Coles, a founder of G.J. Coles, assisted with the purchase of land at Carrum Downs, 30 kilometres from Melbourne.
By this time there were 20 young Brotherhood men working and studying in Fitzroy and living in Keble House, the former school room at St Peter's Eastern Hill, and in a bush setting at Carrum Downs. At 'the Downs', they lived in huts, or 'cells', lining two sides of a grassy square with a chapel at one end and a communal and meeting room at the other. Thirty-nine men joined the Brotherhood in the pre-war years and 21 of the 27 students who studied for the Th. L. passed their examinations.
In 1937 Tucker, at the age of 52, was desolated by the death of 32-year-old Guy Cox. 'He meant more to me than I can say,' Tucker wrote. 'Had he been my own son I could not have cared for him more. Great as the difficulties might be, he never faltered. His radiant personality was always there to show the way out of difficulties and to make the burden lighter.
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When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the members of the Brotherhood went off to wartime occupations. Several pacifists, wanting to serve society in ways other than in the armed services, joined the staff of the Brotherhood's embryonic weifare service. Among them was Frank Coaidrake, an energetic and talented young Anglican priest.
In the war and early post-war years, Tucker and pacifists Frank Coaidrake, Tony Bishop, Don Wilding pioneered research and social and political action activities. They were looking for new roles for charitable organisations, Church-related or not. At Coaldrake's initiative the Church of England Men's Society (CEMS) produced 7776* 7<5/7 (1944), a studyof 'problem families' by economist John Reeves. Wilding and Coaidrake wrote on housing, alcoholism, homelessness and the plight of children growing up in poor homes.
The film (1946) showed the stupidity ofcommitting alcoholics to the 'revolving door' of recurrent, short term gaol sentences. The film (1947) apowerful indictment of stums,^ attracted wide publicity, assisted by Premier John Cain's initial refusal to view it. zy7/%%3/7 (1948) contrasted the lives of children growing up in suburbs across the river Yarra.
The Brotherhood declared 'War on Slums', arguing that infant mortality in Fitzroy was 79 per 1,000 babies born while in middle class Camberwell it was 34. Tucker sought Government action, but also appealed to people to become personally involved by supporting the settlement at Carrum Downs for the unemployed,and other welfare activities. The 'de Campo' case and 'the verandah vigil' attracted media and public attention around Australia to an organisation hitherto unknown outside
Melbourne.
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/ 4 M e r f /7 e ^ a r
To Tucker's great disappointment, the Brotherhood did not reform as a reiigious order, in retrospect, the iack of educational opportunities in the depression years had attracted some of the young men to a community in which they could study, be useful and lead a communal life. After the war there were other opportunities.
Coaldrake's decision to serve in Japan as a missionary immediately after the war added to Tucker's disappointments.The days of the Brotherhood seemed numbered without Coaldrake, whom Tucker saw as his successor. In fact this was the end of the Brotherhood as a religious community. Tucker remained the sole member of the order, retaining the quaint title of 'Superior', and was chairman of a Board that was a monitor and trustee, rather than a policy making body for the welfare service and advocacy work of the Brotherhood. A 32-year-old priest Geoffrey Tremayne Sambell was appointed Director of the
Brotherhood.
Social action, today termed advocacy, was a controversial role for voluntary organisations. Churches and their agencies were seen to have no place in politics, as some political leaders still argue
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today. In Tucker's view 'ambulance work' was an inadequate response to injustice that stemmed largely from prejudice, ignorance and mistaken government policies and priorities. The role of the Brotherhood, he said, was to provide 'fences at the top of the cliff rather than ambulances at the bottom' and to 'arouse the conscience of the nation' to social ills.
Tucker believed that the public and their elected representatives had to be persuaded that unemployment, slum housing, neglect of children and elderly people would not be tolerated in a society he believed still saw itself as Christian. Responsibility lay largely with public opinion and governments, not the people in slums, the unemployed or those unable to care for the young and elderly members of their families in a rapidly changing society. These views were at odds with the 'blaming the victim' attitude prevalent at the time and still alive today.
Tucker had no hesitation in attacking proposals by public figures that diverted limited post-war resources away from housing and other essential needs. 'Who Is Right: The Lord Mayor Or The Superior?' he asked in bold headlines in 1953 in the
his regular communication with the growing number of Brotherhood Friends.
The Lord Mayor and other citizens have told us of their plans for a new town halt, new bridges, civic centres and the like. All most desirable I am sure but I cannot think that such things should be spoken of, much less planned for at this stage while thousands of men, women and children live in filthy hovels.
I believe the policy of the Lord Mayor is a repudiation of those promises we made as a nation to work for a 'New Order', a 'Better World', 'Justice For AH' and the
like. Shoutd the policy of the Lord Mayor be the policy of the country as a whole, I can see nothing but disaster.
The outspoken, etderiy priest was a shrewd campaigner. Popuiar with the media, he used fiims, ietters to the newspapers and his weekly radio program to great effect. A scene from Fa /%%//
showing a baby with house iice crawiing over its face occupied the entire front page of <%//7 /%%?//?/ andpersuaded Premier John Cain to see the documentary, 'i can recali the took on the face of Mr Cain', Tucker wrote, 'when the iights were turned up at the conclusion of the showing of the film to him and members of his Cabinet. He was shocked and as John Cain he would have done something to rectify the evil, but the Cabinet said nothing could be done and therefore nothing was done.'
A still from A'aw/zM
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'Tucker', said Creighton Burns, a committee member of Community Aid Abroad and iater editor of 7776* A 73 'was an angry man'. In the 1960s I remember his reply to a Minister for Housing who responded to Tucker's delegation on slums by saying: 'You know it's very difficult Father, there are many people who have an interest in keeping things as they are'. 'Tell us who they are and we'll deal with them,' Tucker said as he jumped to his feet.
Taking the cause to Parliament, he formed the 'Fair Deal for AH' campaign demanding decent housing. This was followed by the 'All Parties Housing League' which extracted a promise of $1.5 million from the government for slum abolition. This was also a response to the work of Oswald Barnett, a Methodist layman, who had campaigned against slums since 1930 and was a member of the Housing and Slum Investigation Board appointed by the Government in 1936. Tucker knew the offer was worthless without a commitment to a time to start, so wrote to the Minister saying he would like a date for the commencement of work to organise a service of thanksgiving on the site.
A meeting sponsored by the All Parties Housing League in the Assembly Halt in Collins Street broke up in disarray with a former Housing Minister, Bill Barry, asking Tucker if he knew there was a timber shortage. Tucker pointed out that Barry had been the minister when building materials were made available for refurbishment of the Regent Theatre, the home of Reginald Ansett at Mt Eliza and other projects less essential than housing.
'This fills me with despair', he declared in a lull in the shouting as he closed the meeting. 'I'm sorry I called this meeting. It's become a political slanging match. We might as well be in Parliament.' The Housing Minister, Arthur Warner, who had supported the League, wrote the next day saying he thought Tucker had made a mistake in calling the meeting.
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The only way to move the politicians, Tucker conducted, was to ratty the Churches. They woutd be an irresistibte force if Dr Daniel Mannix, the inftuential Cathotic Archbishop, could be persuaded to take part in a meeting to be held under the auspices of Tucker's latest front, 'The Slum Abolition Campaign'. It was bold to even contemplate inviting Dr Mannix to join other Church leaders at this time. Relations between the Catholic and other Churches were strained and there was little communication or cooperation.
As Honorary Secretary of the Slum Abolition Campaign, I went with Tucker to meet Archbishop Mannix. I was nervous and anxious about the success of the historic meeting and scarcely remembered more than the softness of Mannix's hand and handshake, the cups of tea and the feeling that the churchmen were deeply respectful of one another. Mannix declined to attend the meeting, held again in the Assembly Hall, described by cynics as 'the home of lost causes', but he endorsed the Campaign and sent Father Eric Perkins, head of the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau, as his representative.
Slowly the government addressed slum clearance but in doing so created new problems, with ill-planned 20 storey blocks of flats and a clearance momentum that bulldozed habitable terraces and homes in the inner suburbs in the name of redevelopment, illustrating the unintended consequences of social reform.
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/4 p e r s o n a /r a / / a c f / o /7
So who was Tucker and what of his life is reievant at the beginning of this century? A passionate beiief in the Christian faith drove him to overcome the personal difficulties of shyness, speech stammer, slight build, sheltered upbringing and limited intellectual achievements to become a passionate and effective social reformer.
The decision to remain celibate may not have been easy. His biographer John Handheld believes he was strongly attracted to a woman whom he met in England during the war. Like all priests he regarded the children of his parishioners and of his family as, in a way, his own, and he was warm and generous with them.His nephews and nieces were gladly drawn in to the activities of their outspoken uncle, as were his brothers and sisters while asking apprehensively, 'What will Gerard do next?'
Simple economy, or what might be described today as economic realism, was an important reason for insisting members of the Brotherhood remain celibate for as long as they were members of the Order. Five unmarried men, Tucker calculated, living on their keep and 10 shillings a week, with no family distractions, would do five times the work of one married vicar and cost no
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more; a catenation that left out the contribution of the wives of the ctergy.
tn Fitzroy, he lived in a small two room cottage with a windowless bedroom behind the two storey shops the Brotherhood had converted into a hostel in Brunswick Street. Later, he lived in a vicarage at East Brunswick with his Alsatian dog, Koko. It was a small, cold fibro-cement cottage reached by duckboards over the winter mud. He lived frugally and kept to the Brotherhood rule of 'keep and 10 shillings a week'. When the means test for the age pensions was eased for a time in 1973, former Prime Minister Menzies declared he would buy a bottle of whisky with his pension money. Another former Prime Minister, William McMahon, became the only Member of Parliament to receive an age pension and child endowment at the same time. Tucker gave his pension cheque to Community Aid Abroad.
Although he chose a life of almost extreme frugality he supported adequate wages for those who worked for the Brotherhood. However he thought they should be paid a little less than others as a symbolic way of showing they did not work for the Brotherhood for money atone. Similarly, he believed University education was important for people who worked at the Brotherhood although he had never studied beyond his theology diploma. Peter Hollingworth and I were two of several people whose University courses were paid by the Brotherhood.
In the 1960s he moved to the Carrum Downs property which had become a settlement for elderly people. He came to the city several days a week where he worked in a small, shared office above the Brotherhood shop in Royal Arcade in the centre of Melbourne. He would arrive with boxes of pot plants from his nursery, exchange jokes with the shop helpers, slowly climb the spiral staircase, dust the Arcade grit from his desk and, after tea
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and a biscuit, begin the day's work— ietters to the newspapers, personal letters of thanks to every donor, drafts of a proposal for a housing scheme.
He seemed, to visitors, to live on Weeties, Vegemite, boiled eggs and reheated tea, but when he lived at the village settlements he pioneered at Carrum Downs and Lara he joined others in the dining room. Although he had no close friends at this time, he enjoyed the companionship of the people who loved and respected him in those settlements. His warmth, enthusiasm and sense of fun attracted people to him.
He liked travelling and always took his small caravan on 'Slums Must Go' tours of the country to be independent of invitations to stay in private homes. I remember a week at Wilson's Promontory in 1953 when I towed his caravan over the steep and narrow roads that led to the national park to share what was for him a rare holiday. I fished while he read, wrote, smoked his pipe and talked enthusiastically of his plans to right society's wrongs, and the way his beloved Brotherhood could change Australian society.
In today's climate of ecumenical cooperation, his attitude to the divisions of the Church seems unexceptional, but 40 years ago it was very different. The organisation that began as a small group of Anglicans with closely shared beliefs welcomed Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, people of the Jewish faith
and agnostics to its staff.
Tucker believed if the Churches worked together in areas where there were no doctrinal reasons not to do so, they would be better able to address the matters that divided them so deeply. Geoffrey Sambell, Director of the Brotherhood from 1947 to 1970, shared this view. Sambell enjoyed a close working
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relationship and friendship with Eric Perkins who became a bishop in Melbourne's Catholic diocese. These two worked closely with John Westerman of the Methodist Church.
Tucker was not always easy to work with. He was strong willed, highly disciplined with himself and expected the work of the Brotherhood to take precedence over the personal and even the family responsibilities of the people who worked with him. His biographer John Handheld believed he created the Brotherhood as a vehicle for putting his social and religious ideas into practice, and did not see it as becoming a commune of equals. There were friendly jokes about the 'Tuckerhood of St Laurence'. Sambelt described him as 'a visionary, also autocratic, aesthetic and an individualist'.
He was impatient with the detail of finance and administration although he recognised the need for organisation. He had differences of opinion, and sometimes deep disagreements, with those who worked closely with him— Coaldrake, Sambetl and me. He often refused to see, or admit, the failings of people whom he had encouraged and relied upon. Who was right and who was wrong seldom mattered for long because there was always an underlying confidence in one another's integrity.
Tucker opposed communism but said, 'many of those who hold communist views are as honest in their convictions as I am in mine'.
I cannot think that it serves any good purpose to treat those who hold views different to one's own as if they were dishonest and time-servers. Many people, in their fear of communism and in their lack of knowledge of how to deal with the matter accuse those of us who dare criticise the present regime of
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being 'feilow travelers'. [Bishop] Burgmann can hold his own without any assistance from me or from anyone else, but all are not as impregnable as isheJ°
He believed the principles of communism were wrong.
They are not the principles of Christianity in which I have absolute confidence realising it to be the only perfect plan for the welfare of mankind. I hate communism and I am afraid of it. The chief cause of my fear is that so little is done to eradicate those things that make its growth possible. Many of those who are opposed to communism are the system's allies.
He cited lavish expenditure on the Olympic Games while slums still remained and the futility of trying to pass acts of Parliament to ban communism. 'Such was the folly of those who tried to stamp out Christianity. Were we to devote more of our time, energy and money to doing away with those things which we all know to be wrong there would be no communism to fear.'^
Bishop James Grant recalls one colleague describing Tucker as a 'bomb thrower', apt to toss out challenges, suggestions that lodged and disturbed and often resulted in action.
He likened Australia's response to starving millions in Asia to Marie Antoinette's reaction to the women of Paris who had no bread, 'let them eat cake'. 'What are you doing about the f-f-f- famine in India?' he asked. 'Don't just t-t-t-talk about your faith, do something with it', he challenged.
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Tucker made great demands, said Grant. 'He ctaimed much from you and he knew he had the right to make demands because he had accepted similar demands for himself. He was both fearless and invutnerabie. He had nothing to iose, he who tived in a caravan wearing a threadbare suit, sustained by boiied eggs.'^ Words written by art critic Daniel Thomas about Arthur Boyd on his death encapsutate Tucker's personaiity— 'his personal behaviour was aiways unusuaily considerate and quiet, concealing the sty determination that goes with saintliness.'^
He was a 'fisher of men'. The world could only be changed by people with vision being drawn into movements like the Brotherhood. He failed to recruit young men for the Brotherhood of his dreams after the war but he drew many into other kinds of social commitment. I was one of many attracted by his enthusiasm, his conviction that good wilt triumph over evil and the sense of excitement and adventure he created about the task of influencing society. Jim Grant believed Tucker met the classic two fold definition of God's Saints: 'One who brought forth in his or her life the fruit of the Spirit and one who significantly advanced the Kingdom of God in the lives of men and women'.^
He was an innovator and established an innovating tradition. 'The Brotherhood must do on a small scale what governments should do on a large scale.' His innovations included hostels for unemployed young people, the settlement for unemployed families, the first village settlement where active elderly people could lead useful lives and manage their own affairs, Australia's first club for elderly people, the Coolibah Club, and the problem family rehousing scheme.
Geoffrey Sambell, with Professor Norval Morris of Melbourne University, established the first legal aid service in the 1950s.The Family Service Project was an innovative approach to
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working with rejected families in the emergency housing centre at Camp Pelt in Royal Park in the 1960s. The first family planning clinic for low income families was another Brotherhood innovation in Sambell's time.
New initiatives in the 1970s included: the Family Centre, a radical developmental approach to enabling severely disadvantaged families to gain control over their lives; the first Family Day Care service; the Cost Rental Housing Association; a policy of providing financial and administrative assistance to self-help groups that lacked the resources the Brotherhood could call on; and the 'Pensioners' Little Budget Campaign'.
Peter Hollingworth, who succeeded me as Director in 1981 and became Archbishop of Brisbane in 1990, and his successor Bishop Michael Challen continued Tucker's tradition of exploring new ways of meeting social needs through research, experimentation and advocacy.
Community Aid Abroad, Australia's first non-government international aid and advocacy agency is another memorial to Tucker's vision and persistence.^ It began in 1954 when Father Tucker encouraged a group of elderly people at Carrum Downs to do something to help people suffering during a famine in India. The money they collected was sent to Pierre Oppliger, a Quaker working in India, and links were made with Indian self-help projects.
This was enough for Tucker to launch a new organisation, the 'Food for Peace Campaign'. It was sustained by letters to 777<? /%?pby Tucker, Zelman Cowan, Edmund Herring and others who saw the need to involve Australians in understanding and in relationships with neighbouring nations. The name was derived from a statement of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers that
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'there could be no peace in the world while millions lived in poverty'. When President Kennedy launched a huge food aid program to be called 'Food for Peace', Tucker wrote to the US President telling him the name was already in use.
I was seconded by the Brotherhood in 1961 to be the first staff member. The name was changed to Community Aid Abroad. It was the first overseas aid organisation, other than missionary societies and Red Cross. CAA focussed on community development and established links with communities, then mostly in India but gradually expanding to other countries.
There was an enthusiastic response from people who suddenly realised Australia was part of an Asia of newly independent countries and who were keen to assist and to learn something of the progress as well as the problems and the culture and history of our neighbours. By the end of the decade there were 170 Community Aid Abroad groups throughout Australia, a large handcraft importing and selling business, community education programs and overseas study tours.
Tucker saw the main tasks of the Brotherhood and Community Aid Abroad as campaigning, 'arousing the conscience of the community'. Community services were valuable in assisting people, providing knowledge of the causes and complexities of social problems and giving legitimacy to the Brotherhood's proposals for government action. However, the main task was to change attitudes.
He was a lone campaigner, jealously guarding the independence of the Brotherhood and insisting it should be outside the governance of the Church although legally linked to the Anglican Church. He had an intuitive fear that his straightforward beliefs and style would be compromised by membership of other
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organisations or by comptex intetiectual argument. He was not a member of the Angtican synod and unlike Sambel), who pioneered political action in Councils of Social Service, he did not join other organisations.
He was a visionary not a manager, it is unlikely the Brotherhood would have survived for long after Coaldrake's departure in 1945 if Archbishop Booth had not responded to Tucker's request for help by appointing Geoffrey Sambell— a 32-year-old returned service priest— to assist the 64-year-old Tucker. Sambell's vision for the Church and its rote in society was in accord with Tucker's. Sambell was a good manager and in his own words his task was 'keeping the feet of the visionary earthed'. When Sambell was appointed Archbishop of Perth in 1971,1 returned to the Brotherhood from Community Aid Abroad to replace him as Director, a position I held until 1980.
Tucker was always looking for new ways to publicise the Brotherhood and to raise money. Cards were printed that had to be pricked with a pin to record each penny contributed towards the target of five shillings. Cottage money boxes were distributed to shops and to BSL Friends. Tea was bought in bulk and sold to raise funds. Tucker and Sambell pioneered the network of Opportunity Shops now operating around the nation. In the 1930s Tucker urged friends to donate clothes to assist the poor. To avoid the humiliation of complete dependency, clothing was sold at nominal prices in a shop in Fitzroy.
In 1957, Sambell visited Goodwill Industries in the US during a study tour of welfare developments overseas. On his return he persuaded the Brotherhood to buy a warehouse and trucks and to expand and develop shops on commercial lines, and the sate of unusable clothing as waste. The mildly risque slogan on shops and trucks was 'We Treasure Your Waste'. After his visit to the
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US Sambelt predicted that drug use would become a problem in Australia, an idea i thought far-fetched in the innocence of a fifties Austratia enjoying fui) empioyment.
Tucker was critica) of the custom of sending flowers that soon withered on coffins and graves to express sympathy to the famiiies of peopte who had died, in the 1960s he launched 'The Better Way', a scheme which encouraged people to send donations to the Brotherhood to be used for housing elderiy people. The family received a dignified card saying the named person had sent a gift, in honour of the person who had died, that wouid be a permanent memoriai in the form of housing for elderiy people in need. Many cottages were financed in this way.
Before gerontology became a branch of medical practice, Tucker called for studies of the process of ageing. He believed elderly people should be encouraged to remain active and involved in community affairs. On a visit to a hostel for elderly people in western Victoria, he caused consternation by suggesting the armchairs be burned when asked how the centre could be improved. He reflected on his own experience of ageing in 7%*
7 o % a booklet published in the late 1960s.
Tucker loved the Church and grieved that people were drifting away from it. In 1964, when living at Lara, near Geelong, he formed the Lara Movement, an attempt to revive interest in Christianity and the Church. 'The Lara Movement Affirmation', said Handheld, 'was a remarkable document because it contained the conscious beliefs by which Gerard Kennedy Tucker lived his life. The same ideas had been expressed over and over again in his sermons, but at the age of 80 for the first time he put them down on paper in full as the starting point for a new movement which he hoped would carry on after he died.'^
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The Affirmation was the persona) theology of Tucker— 'a theoiogy that his fetlow clergy had been inclined to regard as too simplistic for the times'. It urged readers to 'put aside preconceived ideas and examine the life and teaching of Jesus Christ as if something quite new'. It asked why Christianity decreases while communism and secular bodies were growing; why the Church had been unable to prevent two world wars and was unable to inspire in the nations the spirit of self-sacrifice that alone in the long run can save the world.
The headings reflected the contents— 'What Are We Doing About The Lost Sheep?', 'Dead Wood', 'Putting First Things First', 'Worship and Action', 'Sermon for the Common Man' and 'On What Is Our Faith Founded?' At Tucker's suggestion a pamphlet was distributed in the name of the movement opposing Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. But it was too late. Tucker was almost 90 and the Movement quietly folded.
Some years before his death, Tucker had a mild stroke from which he recovered. When he was in the Geelong Hospital, Peter Hollingworth, then Chaplain of the Brotherhood, called to see him for what Peter thought would be the last time. He asked Tucker what those who would carry on should do about the Church.With a weak voice and a slight stammer, Tucker whispered: 'B- b-b-burn it down and start again'. He loved the Church as God's instrument and the vehicle for Christian belief, but understood the need for renewal.
Bishop James Grant, Chairman of the Board of the Brotherhood for many years, raised the question of how to explain 'the connection between Tucker, the traditional, simplistic, sacerdotal, Anglo-Catholic priest and today's open, professional and broadly based Brotherhood'. The sophisticated agency, he thought, 'was the creation of Sambell and Scott, not Tucker'. Yet
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Tucker was immensely proud of it as an instrument of sociat justice, aithough it was far removed from the communities of ctergy and laity he hoped would invigorate the church and infiuence society.
He died in the Geeiong hospital in March 1974 in his 89th year. Handheld says, 'His life had been modelled on his father's whom he so greatly admired and wanted to please, but in the living of it he went far beyond his father's attainments'. He had written his epitaph in a note found in the small cash box among his few possessions: 'I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the Faith' (Timothy 2:7).
His legacies are the Brotherhood and Community Aid Abroad, organisations that have touched the lives of many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of supporters, beneficiaries and partners in Australia and in more than 30 countries through services, development assistance, sharing, learning, educating and advocacy for social justice.
The characteristics of Tucker's ideas and work were responsibility beyond services into social and political action, sometimes even in defiance of laws; the importance of innovation; the need for social priorities in public policy; a more integrated, 'holistic' Church ministry; and avoiding cooption to organisations that compromise independence. He also showed that the commitment and perseverance that come from belief are necessary for success, as well as a good measure of anger at injustice.
His motive, said Geoffrey Sambetl, was crystal clear. 'If asked Father Tucker would say, "because God loves me." His simple motivation was to show God as love.'^
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Edna Walling 1896-1973 English-Australian Father Kennedy Tucker c.1950-1960 gelatin silver photograph 21.5 x 16.5 cmPresented by Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
33
34
/V 0 f 2 S
The story is told in ^ 6*A?/yby tsobe! Carter, Landsdowne Press,
1967. ibid. Handfietd John, / C w / K Z ? /! Z/^ r7Z^<?/3/zZA<?/7/7
7Z/cA^/; ZZ?///7rZ?r r?Z Z/7<? Z?/v//76v/70cr/ r?Z 6*Z Z^ r^ /7^ d/7r/
Z*o/77/77 //7/ A<y/!Z7/i7 Hytand House, 1980. See also Z?/i?Zw7<3/y Horace Finn Tucker and Gerard Kennedy
Tucker by Ruth Carter, p 275. Tucker, Gerard Kennedy, ^/7Zr^F<?, Brotherhood of St
Laurence, 1954.s Handheld (1980) p 43. Holden, Colin, /vu/7? 7o/yay /4Z Z^a^/* /o 6*oc/^Zy /!/
Melbourne University Press, 1996, p 201. ibid p212. Tucker, ibid p102. Oswald Barnett, a Methodist layman, had begun campaigning
against slums in the mid-1930s. His forceful advocacy and the publicity given to it obliged the Dunstan government to initiate an inquiry that identified several thousand substandard homes which could only be demolished, and many more that needed
extensive repairs.
35
Tucker, op cit. ibid, p. 90.
^ Grant, James, The Very Reverend, at the launching of /vy<?/7d?/I /%? 7 /c /*by John Handfieid,
Hyland House, 1980.^ 26 April 1999.^ ibid.^ /o/7d/7<?Fby Susan Blackburn (Melbourne University
Press1994) is the history ot Community Aid Abroad.^ Handfieid, p 193.^ Address by Geoffrey Sambell, Archbishop of Perth, at the Fiftieth
Anniversary of the Brotherhood of St Laurence at Christ Church, South Yarra on Sunday 7 December 1980.
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Gerard Tucker (right) with his mother Lavinia and the author, 1932.
David Scott AO is a nephew of Gerard Kennedy Tucker. He joined the staff of the Brotherhood in 1953. He was Directorof Community Aid Abroad 1961 -70, Director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence 1970-80, Executive Chairman Land Conservation Counci! 1984-94.
B R O T H E R H O O Dof S! LAURENCE
Heiping peopie bui!d better iives
